UAH: Global Temperature Dives in May

Confirming what many of us have already noted from the anecdotal evidence coming in of a much cooler than normal May, such as late spring snows as far south as Arizona, extended skiing in Colorado, and delays in snow cover melting, (here and here), the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) published their satellite derived Advanced Microwave Sounder Unit data set of the Lower Troposphere for May 2008.

It is significantly colder globally, colder even than the significant drop to -0.046°C seen in January 2008.

Compared to the May 2007 value of 0.199°C we find a 12 month ∆T is -.379°C.

But even more impressive is the change since the last big peak in global temperature in January 2007 at 0.594°C, giving a 16 month ∆T of -0.774°C which is equal in magnitude to the generally agreed upon “global warming signal” of the last 100 years.

I’m betting that RSS (expected soon) will also be below the zero anomaly line, since it tends to agree well with UAH. HadCRUT will likely show a significant drop, I’m going to make a SWAG and say it will end up around 0.05 to -0.15°C. GISS; I’m not going to try a SWAG, as it could be anything. Of course anomalies can change to positive on the next El Nino, but this one seems to be deepening.

Update 06/05/08: Per MattN’s suggestion, changed link above for snow melt to news stories from previous link to National Snow and Ice Center

230 thoughts on “UAH: Global Temperature Dives in May”

And June isn’t looking much warmer here in my part of California. We might hit “normal” temps for this time of year two days this week, if we are lucky. The long range forecast doesn’t show us going much above “normal” until the 11th.

I knew it (boasting) sorry can’t help myself (see previous rex posts).. but of anyone can follow the trend by looking at the graphs. Looks like June may be scarier… because it would to take a steep up notch to catch up with mean at this stage.

At least we are lucky with the weather here in Sweden. For 5 days we have had temperatures around 25-30 degrees. And the forecast tells us that it will continue. We have even had warmer weather here in stockholm than Barcelona in Spain :D. The monhly anormaly since january is like +1,5 C.
LOCAL warming anyone?

Based on UAH LT temperature data from ~1980 to end April 2008 and pre-1980 ST data from Hadcrut3, I recently stated that there was no net global warming since ~1940, in spite of an almost 800% increase in humanmade CO2 emissions.

The May 2008 decline of an additional ~0.2C in the UAH global average LT temperature further reinforces this conclusion.

Furthermore, it is clear that CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales, from ice core data spanning thousands of years to sub-decadal trends.

This data consistently suggests that the sensitivity of global temperature to increased atmospheric CO2 is near-zero, and there is no human-made catastrophic global warming crisis.

Politically I’m already speculating for the next 2 years. The UAH results will certainly spook Gore and the AGW activists. They’ve run out of time, and know they’ll have to move super fast to install their new regime.
1. Obama will win by a land slide in November.
2. The Democrats will also gain seat in both houses.
3. Gore will get a key energy and environmental post in Obama’s Admin.
4. Obama will sign Kyoto immediately after innauguration
5. He will do the same for carbon cap and trade.
6. An El Nino will pop up next year.
7. Temps will rebound.
8. UAH, RSS will be defunded
9. FoxNews will pull a Scott McClellan
10. GISS and HadCrut will release alarming warming data in 2009 and 2010.
11. But by the next election period in 2010, global temps will have in reality plummeted another 0.5°C, inflation will be near double digit, and unemployment will be rising rapidly.

And yet the AGWarmiots will soldier on bravely, with a trembly voice, saying “the warming is currently on hiatus, having gone into hiding deep in the oceans”. The warming trend is still there, they will say (and are saying), just is being masked by a short-term natural (gasp!) variation. Then, they will point to any and all “extreme” weather, and say, “see, this is unprecedented, and is the result of the hidden man-made GW.” And, they’ll add, “when the warming does resume, it will do so with a vengeance so we need to stop all this C02 pollution now, before it’s too late.” AGW religion is resilient, if nothing else.

Looking at that graph, I am sure glad that I don’t have to plot a trend line. I realy don’t think there is any long term trend. There seems to be a short term, or begining of a long term downward trend at the end.

The lower middle of Oregon and the adjacent upper middle slice of California has a frost advisory out for Thursday with temps dropping into the low 30’s. A large area of low ground could experience crop kill. brrrrrr!

As the World Cools, the US Congress cuts off all attempts for the US to produce its own energy from shale oil, offshore oil, arctic oil, tar sands, coal, nuclear, hydro, offshore wind, and anything else the current Congress sees as an “environmental” or “greenhouse” threat. Now Congress is voting on whether to send the US economy back to the stone age to suit Gore, Soros, and a few other Davos Divas.

There are words for this US Congress that one must not say, and there are deeds and consequences appropriate to repay them for what they are doing and have done, which must not be discussed. There will nevertheless be an accounting of some type, at some time. We at Oynklent Green [OTC:OYNK] are maintaining our books with all fastidiousness.

Last night Possible President Obama said that he would stop the seas from rising. Oratory need colorful images, but that seemed a little over-the-top.

One might surmise he knows about solar physics, has read papers such as Landscheidt’s ( http://bourabai.narod.ru/landscheidt/new-e.htm ) and believes solar cycles 24 and 25 will be calm, leading to buildup of ice, lowering sea levels. Just joking.

The tropical cooling is interesting. The Earth’s climate is essentially a system for transporting heat from the tropics towards the poles where it is radiated out to space. Tropics temperatures have been on a straight line down for a year now and that means less heat available to transport to higher latitudes. I’d say there is significant (global) cooling in the pipeline from the tropical cooling to date. My SWAG is -0.3 to -0.5 more global cooling by the end of the year and that assumes no further tropical cooling.

The high tomorrow in Denver is forecast to be 54 F. This will blow away the record high minimum of 65 F for the date. In fact the latest seasonal date with a record high minimum of 54 for Denver in NOAA’s records dating back to the 1800’s is May 10, almost a month ago.

This is certainly reflected by May temps in the Midwest. I play in a Monday morning senior golf league that began on April 28th with a 7:30 AM temperature of 35 degrees. The following Monday, May 5th it was 43 with a 25-30 mph wind out of the Northwest. On May 12th it was also in the low 40’s, and the following Monday back in the high 30’s again. By my calculation, the average Monday morning temperature from April 28th until June 2nd was 47. Even on May 26th, when it was 66 at tee time, it had dropped to the mid 50’s by the time we finished.

Yes yes YES. Here in Texas we are having late July/August temps – it was 111 in Wink, TX yesterday. Here in San Antonio it was 98-99 yesterday. This is way above normal for this time of year, and after a cool spring no-one is ready for this heat. It’s definitely straining the electrical grid.

That’s a very scary list of prognostications. Scariest of all is that you might be right. I’m torn between whether Obama will turn out to be another McGovern or another Carter. Your scenario is more the latter, and we all know how that turned out. I think, though, that Obama turning out to be another McGovern is within the realm of possibility. McGovern was soundly defeated by an unpopular incumbent. In a sense, McCain is inheriting the mantle of an unpopular administration, but might actually prove a little more “popular” than Nixon was at the time he defeated McGovern.

Still, the analogy to ~1978 — rising energy prices, cold weather, sluggish economy — will only get worse if Obama is elected. Then we’ll have a President who will be weak on foreign affairs, in charge of a tax and spend Congress who will see “climate change” like the “energy crisis” of the late 1970’s as a “mandate” for governmental action that will only make things worse. I hope it doesn’t happen.

Is anyone continuing Landscheidt’s work on center of mass effects on the sun? I’m tempted to start the usual rumor that the Warmers took him out to stop the research since the debate is over. I’m SWAGing a news report saying that the cooling is because the high cost of fuel is making people drive and fly less.

I am 56 years old, lived through the great freeze in the UK in 62/63, moved to the Southern Hemisphere in 1975 and have experienced climate shifts ever since. There is nothing unusual with the weather now (even as I experience La Nina rain and cold battering the window). What is alarming, but almost predictable over about a 30-40 year cycle, is the drift to totalitarianism and anti-scientific rationalism (Prussian militarism, Nazism/Communism, Cutural Revolution). This time it’s driven by the huge, unaccountable bureaucracies of the UN and EU, captured by socialist/green extremism, and driving a mindless media. We have an enormous socio/political problem on our hands. How can we tackle this?

REPLY: The point is that CO2 doesn’t appear to be in control of the climate system as has been claimed. Natural variance is still king, CO2 is not overriding it as some have claimed.

If you’ll read my “about” page (link at top menu) you’ll see I’m very much for conservation, alternate energy, and removing noxious pollutants from our processes.

But, the panic over CO2 seems to be overblown, and the linkage is weak. There’s more rhetoric and claims than linkage that holds over time. Solar, nuclear, fules cells, electric cars (I drive one) are all better bets anyway. let’s embrace them, make them work, and stop worrying ourselves to death or trying to legislate change. Government doesn’t solve problems, market forces and inspired people do.

I mention data such as those published by UAH to our AGW folks in central NC (we have them by the carload), and they just snort.

Although the first part of June is reported to be typically warm here in the Piedmont of North Carolina, note that this week, we’re running near record high temperatures (high 90s). Go figure regional differences…

*OVER 20 YEARS WITH NO NET WARMING. I REPEAT, OVER 20 YEARS WITH NO NET WARMING*.”

Except of course that you can’t compare different places in the solar cycle. May 2008, which is at the bottom of the solar cycle can be compared to May 1996 (+0.065), May 1986 (-0.153). So, during the last two solar cycles the 12 month average temperature has risen 0.269 centigrades. No net warming? Yeah, right.

Next cycle (24) will probably be strong, so in around 5-6 years we will see global temperature records broken again.

Good news is that cycle 25, that peaks 2022 will be weak, so global warming will be felt less then, presumably. And with some serious efforts we could lessen greenhouse production before cycle 26, which starts sometime around 2030.

Anthony, the thing I find most interesting is that even during the January when the Earth is closest to the sun (90w/m2) we still had a dramatic decrease in temperature. This being said I am close to post a barycentric comparison to solar. wait for some software at the moment.

Actually, only the Northern Hemisphere now has a significant trend over the past 29 years.

Also, Philip B., if you look at the data, there seems to be no such thing as a lag between tropical warming and NH warming. They go hand in hand, and, contrary to what I thought, temperature excursions are larger in the tropics. Maybe Anthony can comment.

REPLY: The northern hemispshere has the lions share of weather stations and population growth.

The May 08 UAH MSU Global SST is -0.28 deg C. That’s the lowest value since March 1993. Excuse my scribblings on the graph.

Since its post 97/98 El Nino high (January 2005) of 0.51 deg C, global has dropped 0.79 deg C. It took only 40 months.

Yet the average ONI value for Jan 2005 to April 08 is -0.065 deg C, fundamentally a break even with respect to global SST. Since July 05, the AMO has dropped 0.41 deg C. Assuming the North Atlantic represents 15% of the global ocean area, the maximum AMO contribution can only be 15% of 0.41 deg C or 0.0615 deg C. Since May 2005, the PDO has dropped significantly, 3.38 deg C, but the problem with PDO data is that it’s standardized. Only the keepers of the data know what the actual values are, and they aren’t talking. But let’s assume that 3.38 deg C is the actual drop in temperature in the North Pacific, north of 20N, and let’s also assume that that area represents 15% of the global ocean area. (0 to 20N is a big chunk of the North Pacific.) 15% of 3.38 deg C is 0.5 deg C. Subtracting the contributions of the AMO and PDO from the total decline that still leaves 0.23 deg C unaccounted for.

Something else’s driving down ocean temperatures, but we’ve recently been advised it’s not the sun.

Since Solar Cycle length is not uniform (Cycle 23 is over 12 years and still going, Cycle 21 10.4, Cycle 22 9.6) I do not see how you can use the same month in a particular year as the same point in solar cycles, clearly it isn’t.

I don’t see any evidence for your claim the Cycle 24 will ‘probably’ be strong. In fact, the opposite may be true since most of the time the cycle following an elongated solar cycle is weak.

Nor can you pinpoint the peak of Cycle 24 (which hasn’t started and is 2 years over due) or Cycle 25 at this time.

The lack of any significant volcanic activity makes the current downturn much more significant than other low points since 1979.

Still, it will take at least one more year to turn around the media and even more to wake up the politicians.

Lieberman-Warner may not succeed this time around, but will likely be successful if re-introduced next year. If it does pass and is approved by President Bush, it will take a decade or more to undo – regardless of trends.

Ice went out about 3 weeks late up here. This week we have clouds and showers forecast with our third excursion into the 80’s on Sat. Last June was hot and dry, but then our local climate changed back to late 40’s and early 50’s weather (or so I’m led to believe). We had freezes up north 2 or 3 times last week.
Minnesota the way we remember it: 9 months of winter, followed by 3 months of rough sledding.

Meanwhile, western Europe, or at least Belgium, seems to be in a “warm island”. At the Royal Meteorological Institute at Uccle, near Brussels, May 2008 was the warmest May since the observations began in 1901.

In light of the expected long interval until the onset of Cycle 24, the Prediction Panel has been unable to resolve a sufficient number of questions to reach a single, consensus prediction for the amplitude of the cycle. The deliberations of the panel supported two possible peak amplitudes for the smoothed International Sunspot Number (Ri): Ri = 140 ±20 and Ri = 90 ±10. Important questions to be resolved in the year following solar minimum will lead to a consensus decision by the panel.

The panel agrees solar maximum will occur near October, 2011 for the large cycle (Ri=140) case and August, 2012 for the small cycle (Ri=90) prediction.

As you can see they don’t appear to be able to agree between themselves what cycle 24 will be like.

It’s my humble opinion that vastly all of the temperature increase in the NH over the last 30 years is due to less sulfates (thus, less dimming of the sun). Approx. 85% of all sulfates originate in the NH. Plot the anomalies of NH versus SH (with either RSS or UAH monthly data). You will see that the 12-month running means split into two around the mid-90’s. Since then, there is a gap between the NH and SH anamolies. Question: why were these anamolies on top of each for the first 15 years, and then suddenly spread apart? Answer: less sulfate pollution in the America, Europe, and Former Soviet Union. To me, it seems obvious looking at the data.

It is true that global temps were lower at their lowest points during the last two minimums…however, keep in mind that the May 2008 12 month mean does not reflect the low point of this cycle yet. Assuming for argument’s sake that temperature’s rise slowly from here on out and solar cycle 24 gets going soon, the lowest 12 month mean will likely come in 3-5 months. It will be significantly lower than the .116 where we sit now. Consider that January, February, March, April and now may were all colder than that.

If the Jan-May average continues for another couple months, the 12 month mean is just about guaranteed to fall near 0. There, in my opinion, is a very good chance it could fall lower than it did in 1996.

The Texas power grid was threatened when the energy company was paid out $35 B in 2006(?) to go private in return for a committment to take 9-10 coal fire generators off the drawing board. Get ready for worse.

Geostatistic temperatures are regionalised variable and never should be other than local.

@rex
The picture is right. I live in north Germany and it has been warm. The German media, which are universal in their AGW belief, have been pretty much saying the whole world has been gettin warmer.
But Germans returning from their vacations in Spain are astonished that it has been so cold in Spain.

that’s what I discovered last year and seems to be the same thing this year: while northern europe and scandinavia seem to be unusually warm the mediterrean bassin is rather cold, spain, italy etc.
Is this a pattern?

Well, you know because Al said, “The planet has a fever”, therefore it must.

Still, I am in agreement with Dr Pielke, who maintains that the best metric for ‘global climate change’ is not atmospheric temperature at 6′ altitude, but Ocean Heat Content. Argos shows a slight cooling of the oceans since 2003, hence no global warming since that time.

It has been a mild May this year in England. In fact I’m sure it was warmer in March when I was up in Scotland near Inverness. For the past decade or more it has been getting warmer where I live but this trend has changed. It had got to the point where you could not even expect a frost over December. We had a mild but cool winter, but snow did turn up in April. Have not seen that for years. I kept my heating on until May which is unusual. GB as an Island might be getting milder weather still than europe (at a guess). Particles or aerosols is something I considered since the heat waves in Europe. The air is cleaner over europe hence the deaths in 2003 from heat stroke. It makes you wonder what effect the dirt over China and India is having.

Basil,
I wish I could share your optimism, but Obama will be a shoe in. McCain is just old mouldy bread – and aint got a snowball’s chance in global-warming hell. To keep my last post short, I actually left out the scariest real possibility, and it’s a real one:

*** The dissident US media (i.e. Talk Radio, Skeptic blogs and FoxNews) are in for some real rough times in 09 ***

How do I know this? The Left Wing of the Democrats have been coordinating and acting in concert with the European Socialists and Greens.
The media here have been taken over by greeny elitists and are universal in their AGW belief – there’s no dissenting media here.
Public opinion in Germany for example is universal when it comes to AGW. The Democrat Left in the States envy the media domination here in Europe, and see the success just by looking at European public opinion. They will surely move to replicate it.

Good examples of the power of the indoctrinating media here:
1. A huge number of Europeans believe that the moon-landing was very likely staged in Hollywood, and never really happened.
2. The same is true about the US government masterminding 9/11.
3. 90+% of Germans believe in a looming climate catastrophe.
4. The media here has already made Obama into a Messiah-like star.

The citizens here have not been more misled since the days of Adolph Hitler and Josef Goebbels. Was there any mention here of the latest satellite data? Of course not.
Such media power is surely admired by left wing socialists intent on driving a radical tax and control agenda. I know many here will think I’m way off on this – but you’ll see.

There’s only one problem with their scheme though, and you hit it smack on the head. These socialists are surely going to overreach bigtime, and then there’s going to be a huge economic and public backlash.

Already we are seeing a MONSTER IFLATION CYCLE beginning to take hold…all due to needlessy high energy costs.
Inflation is like toothpaste – once it’s out of the tube, it’s real hard to put it back in. And as you have alluded to, Carter was beaten by double digit inflation and unemployment.
I see sunny days ahead, but only after a really bad Category 4 storm.

How many Northern Europeans actually check to see what the temperature is in other parts of the world?
As far as they’re all concerned: it’s unnaturally warm, and something is really wrong! Shoot, the media is not informing them about UAH MSU.

The election dynamic in the US will be very interesting. The media here also seems to regard Obama with a messianic reverential awe, but I think they may end up overdoing it. Obama has a base of emotional, hard core followers who seem to be content that he’s going to ‘change things’ without asking what exactly he intends to change and how. Obama preaching ‘change’, ‘make history’, ‘this is way cool’ seems to be enough for them. If you attempt to engage any of them in a reasonable discussion of his experience, plans, or what exactly he intends to change you’re met with anger, emotional outbursts about that he can ‘bring us together’. Not much to hang your hat on, really.

I think he’s a fine person, articulate, but woefully inexperienced and almost naive in some of his views, such as ascribing the recent increase in gas prices to ‘Big Oil jacking up the price’. I’m afraid he has McGovern views and Carter’s naive approach. I don’t think he has the experience in running a government that we need.

That being said, he may have trouble winning in some States he needs to get elected. If the Democrat primary delegates were awarded in the same manner as the US Electoral College the Democrat Nominee would have been decided months ago, and it would have been Hillary Clinton by a large margin. Barak did not win the popular vote in a single large State and I think he faces a real challenge winning in Fl, Penn, Ohio, States he needs to win the election.

Well, Pierre, I don’t share the depth of your pessimism. I think McCain has a shot at it, and that Obama’s negatives are as serious, or worse, than McCain’s. But unlike whether or not we’re on the cusp of a Dalton Minimum, we’ll know whether you are right about Obama soon enough.

Obama. Heh. Half of HIllary supporters said they’d vote for McCain if Obama was nominee. That’s a quarter of Dem voters. Another chunk may simply stay home or write in Nadir (sic).

It makes me laugh to see all these *huge* “Obama/Hope” posters around town here in Austin. Texas hasn’t voted for a Dem for the presidency since LBJ in ’64. McCain would have to be caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy for Obama to win Texas. Make me think Dems don’t understand state-by-state winner-takes-all, they carry on as though they live in a pure democracy.

Why does it matter if you are comparing temperatures at different parts of the solar cycle? Warmists would have you believe that the sun has nothing to do with climate change and, when it does, it is only Total Solar Irradiance that matters not sun spots!

You are right, but there are a few points you’ve missed. Firstly, in the interests of public trust in the scientific process (which underpins our technological progress), we should not be engaging in the politicisation, doctoring or “spinning” of results to suit some particular political ideology (in this case, Environmentalism – which, I might add, is anti-technocracy). What the Warmists (including Gore) are doing is setting themselves up for the inevitable falsification of an entire body of work. Next time the scientists might be right, but will the media or the public take them seriously? The validity of the entire scientific process is under threat. It’s an important question.

Secondly, although we should be reducing our consumption of oil (primarily because we buy a lot of it from distasteful regimes), there is no need for us to hit economic reverse gear. A possible consequence of doing so would of course be less likelihood of us being able to develop technological solutions that would mitigate or reverse any negative impact we are having on the environment.

Environmentalism doesn’t need straw men to make its point in our increasingly well educated and sophisticated societies. People can see the merits of birds and trees. The messengers don’t need to preach Catastrophism in order to make an impact.

I might add of course that there are many more important problems Humanity needs to solve that are getting far less attention and funding due to the current Warmist alarmism.

Jared: “keep in mind that the May 2008 12 month mean does not reflect the low point of this cycle yet”

I didn’t look at the lowest temperature of these cycles, but at the temperatures at the solar cycle minimum. Which we for all intents and purposes are at now. New new cycle may not have started, but solar activity is about as low as it can be expected to go.

You are all, how you say, “clasping at straws”, to try to pretend that global warming isn’t happening. It’s kinda silly, it’s obviously happening. How much and how serious can be debated, but claiming that it isn’t happening requires serious amounts of fact-ignoring. :)

Doesn’t the fact that you are citing solar cycles suggest that AGW is not the catastrophe that some are positing? There seems to be little evidence that human beings are contributing much — if at all — to global temperature variations. Most likely, global temperature variations are caused by solar cycles.

That is not to suggest that we do nothing about reducing dependence on fossil fuels, pollution, etc., but rather we need to do so in a rational, non-alarmist (!) way.

What all this means to me is that weather variations are normal and will not respond to charts, graphs and SWAGs. But it also suggests rather strongly that “as CO2 rises, temperature rises” is false. Acording to algorean science, the continuing rise in CO2 should continue to raise Earth’s temperature accordingly. Since it has not it looks like Big Al is wrong again. So what else is new?

Bill >> “I don’t see any evidence for your claim the Cycle 24 will ‘probably’ be strong.”

Lennart > No, but this is what NASA and other solar scientists claim. But maybe their science is “alarmist” too?

Lennart, you obviously have more faith in “the rocket scientists” at NASA than I do. I suggest you read http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10mar_stormwarning.htm dated March 10, 2006:
=============begin=quote=============
This week researchers announced that a storm is coming–the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.
==============end=quote=============

but wait… there’s more

=============begin=quote=============
Like most experts in the field, Hathaway has confidence in the conveyor belt model and agrees with Dikpati that the next solar maximum should be a doozy. But he disagrees with one point. Dikpati’s forecast puts Solar Max at 2012. Hathaway believes it will arrive sooner, in 2010 or 2011.

“History shows that big sunspot cycles ‘ramp up’ faster than small ones,” he says. “I expect to see the first sunspots of the next cycle appear in late 2006 or 2007—and Solar Max to be underway by 2010 or 2011.”
==============end=quote=============

Guess what… we’re approaching mid-2008 and still virtually zilch on the cycle 24 front. Even assuming a short (9 year) solar cycle 24, that would be 4.5 years to solar max. Assuming that cycle 24 seriously kicked in today, that would put solar max at the end of 2012, or early 2013. If they got that prediction wrong, what gives you faith that NASA will get it right this time?

While it’s true that a drop of 0.774C in 16 months is dramatic (-0.0484C/mo), there have been comparable/larger drops before. Here are the largest per-month lower troposphere monthly temperature anomaly drops based on at least a 16-month time period:

-0.0556C/mo change from 2/1998 to 6/1999
-0.0519C/mo change from 4/1998 to 8/1999
-0.0484C/mo change from 1/2007 to 5/2008
-0.0454C/mo change from 4/1998 to 1/2000
-0.0452C/mo change from 2/1998 to 8/1999
-0.0446C/mo change from 2/1998 to 7/1999
-0.0423C/mo change from 1/1998 to 6/1999
-0.0420C/mo change from 5/1983 to 9/1984
-0.0415C/mo change from 5/1998 to 1/2000
-0.0410C/mo change from 8/1998 to 1/2000

Granted, most of them start during the great El Nino of 1998, but 1983-4 also shows up. I think we need a few more months’ data to rule out that it’s not just starting at a major positive fluctuation and ending at a major negative one.

If you don’t like fossil fuels, “don’t use them”. I never remember being forced to use any energy source. If you believe that your computer is destroying this planet, then you have the moral obligation to turn it off, and quit using it. This has become more about regulating someone elses access to energy at market prices, than it is about the health of the planet.
I for one, don’t believe any of that AGW crap, and recognize it as a “power-grab” complete with straw man bad-guy, that needs to be defeated. The slogan for AGW should be: “Just give me a global quasi-government panel of regulators, and I will save you from the phantom menace”.
I also believe the best judge of power sources, is the well-informed consumer. If there are alternative sources that have a superior cost-benefit to the end-user, those sources will prevail. If you don’t like any of the sources, boycott the utilities and do it yourself, or do without.

As far as Obama for Prez., he is an attractive candidate, weighed down by the Dumbocratic legacy. The Dems are 2 for the last 7 elections, and those 2 that they won, were both assisted by Ross Parrot, dividing the non-urban voting block. The media will report it as a slam-dunk win, right up until he loses.

The low tropic temperatures can easily be explained by the persistant La Nina and as the Pacific covers half the globe this is obviosly going to have a bearing on global mean temperatures. The Atlantic in comparison looks very different http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.6.2.2008.gif.
Also noteworthy is the Cold anomoly over a large part the USA and Southern Canada and the warm anomoly over Eurasia http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/obsdata/HadCRUT3.html. If there are more temperature recording stations in the USA than anywhere else is it possible that there is a bias in this respect. When the anomolies reverse (which they will) will there then be a bias the other way which, when coupled with an El Nino, would falsely show a huge temperature rise. Because sea temperatures are a more reliable indicator of global temperature changes I use them but I would love to know if there is a bias on Land temperature measurements because of differing densities.
For the record I have previously been a staunch advovate of AGW, I have put a few posts on his excellent blog supporting AGW, but after reading links from you guys, I am definately swinging the other way. The more I learn the more questions I have!

No need to SWAG GISS; Hansen’ll do that for you again and again and again until the data matches his models. From the way they keep tweaking the historical record, it looks like he’s got his folks very well trained.

Would it be wrong to say that soot, despite its capacity for dimming, contributes to warming due to ground cover, whereas sulfates contribute to cooling due to its dimming capacity, particularly at higher altitudes.? If true, the combination of US and Europe reducing sulfate emissions and China contributing soot (but not particularly sulfates by using low sulfur coal) could cause the 90’s warming trend.

When I suggested over at RC that climate models ought to show sensitivity to changes in aerosol assumptions (i.e., high sulfate, low sulfate, high soot, low soot, etc.), I could never get a straight answer from them. Of course, to do so would expose the models as being highly sensitive to the various net forcings that are conjured up to predict a sensible temperature trend for the last 50 years. In other words, their forcings are not independent of one another. If one is out of whack, the other forcings have to be adjusted to compensate. Again, the modelers could make the forcings independent of one another, but if they did, they would have temperature trends pointing in all directions. As long as global temperatures are going up, it’s easy for them to claim that factors other than CO2 don’t matter much. But, once you have oscillating temps, like the 1940-1970 cooling trend and possibly the 2002-onwards trend, it’s going to get harder for them to justify their rigged forcings.

Instead of implementing cap and trade, how much cheaper would it be to install particulate collection devices on all of China’s power plants? Probably 100 times cheaper!

My point is in response to what you said in an earlier post about a strong solar cycle 24, which was:

No, but this is what NASA and other solar scientists claim. But maybe their science is “alarmist” too? :-)

The press release I quoted was released by NOAA, but the panel it talks about was comprised of scientists from NOAA, NASA, and ISES and it refutes your claim that NASA and other scientists are predicting a strong cycle 24.

You also say:

You are all, how you say, “clasping at straws”, to try to pretend that global warming isn’t happening.

I think you need to read this and other threads more carefully. You’ll find that most posts that you would ascribe to “deniers” don’t deny that warming has happened. What I and many others believe is that the science that claims CO2 is the major cause is far from settled and that there are other factors playing a far greater role in climate change.

You are obviously an AGW proponent and yet you are citing the strength/weakness of the solar cycle as having at least as big an effect as CO2 on the climate. This must be so since you say

Next cycle (24) will probably be strong, so in around 5-6 years we will see global temperature records broken again.

The clear implication from what you say is that the current weakness in the solar cycle is enough to mask any effect of increasing CO2 and in order to do that its impact must be at least the same as CO2.

I’d be willing to bet that as little as 6 months ago you would have claimed that the solar cycle had no effect whatsoever on climate. Its good to see that we are changing some minds.

It’s just a tad unscientific to pretend that a decline in temperature from the peak of warming during an El Nino to the peak of cooling during a La Nina has any meaning for global warming. The current temperatures should be compared to the temperatures post La Nina events in the past. May is no different to the temperatures seen during the 1998-2000 La Nina event. The La Nina before this was 0.1 to 0.2C cooler.

BTW I’m tipping another upwards revision in the MSU data soon…. just a hunch.

Would it be wrong to say that soot, despite its capacity for dimming, contributes to warming due to ground cover, whereas sulfates contribute to cooling due to its dimming capacity, particularly at higher altitudes.? If true, the combination of US and Europe reducing sulfate emissions and China contributing soot (but not particularly sulfates by using low sulfur coal) could cause the 90’s warming trend.

There’s a great deal of confusion over how aerosols behave depending upon latitude, type, mix, altitude, etc.

In the Indian Ocean and around the entire Pacific basin, including in the American Pacific NW in springtime, soot & sulfates heat the middle troposphere more than they dim the surface (cooling it).

When I suggested over at RC that climate models ought to show sensitivity to changes in aerosol assumptions (i.e., high sulfate, low sulfate, high soot, low soot, etc.), I could never get a straight answer from them.

That’s b/c it’s a big blank spot, and all they really should admit is that they don’t know.

Of course, to do so would expose the models as being highly sensitive to the various net forcings that are conjured up to predict a sensible temperature trend for the last 50 years. In other words, their forcings are not independent of one another. If one is out of whack, the other forcings have to be adjusted to compensate. Again, the modelers could make the forcings independent of one another, but if they did, they would have temperature trends pointing in all directions. As long as global temperatures are going up, it’s easy for them to claim that factors other than CO2 don’t matter much. But, once you have oscillating temps, like the 1940-1970 cooling trend and possibly the 2002-onwards trend, it’s going to get harder for them to justify their rigged forcings.

Indeed. Even Ramanathan and Carmichael have conceded that since the data for aerosols are lacking from the 1970’s, it is only an assumption that aerosols had a net cooling effect. Again, it may have varied by type, color, spin, strangeness, charm, who knows?

So in the case of criticisms of the skeptic “Hoax” movie (sorry I forget its name) when it covers aerosols … those criticisms are just as speculative as any skeptic factoids pulled out of the air. Ramanathan himself has conceded it could go either way.

Instead of implementing cap and trade, how much cheaper would it be to install particulate collection devices on all of China’s power plants? Probably 100 times cheaper!

That’s the whole gig.

Let’s just say if the odds are low that society can quick mitigate CO2 emissions within a time window against whatever risk is posed from “climate change,” then not only is soot abatement cheaper (and doable), but to ignore it and go about screaming only about CO2 is grossly inconsistent. The activists are acting like they can just snap their Luddite fingers & make it so.

Frankly I think the activists would rather keep the polar bears as CO2 poster children than admit that soot even exists. If they believe that CO2 is a big threat, and they know the data on soot (which EDF does, I know that from reading their blog), and they then avoid mention of soot for fear of diluting the CO2 message and just hope that soot mitigation will follow along, they would then be intentionally playing a game of brinksmanship.

IMO either that belies a willingness to use the bears as game pieces, or it’s really not a crisis. Another possibility is that they’re afraid that aerosols, once abated, will reveal a far softer CO2 warming signal.

Either way soot is the carbon that shall not be named.

Since China’s the biggest emitter of soot & aerosols right now, and the Asian Brown Cloud is what led to Ramanathan’s discovery, then once again, we’re stuck on a political dilemma. This one’s easier to solve, though, you’re right. But if CO2’s not the threat and soot turns out to be the pernicious dark horse that falsely implicated CO2 more than its due, then they won’t have a way to foist their last great effort to bring globo-soc onto the world & the USA down from hegemon (like we’d be better off with a “sinohegemon” trading card instead).

Also, Philip B., if you look at the data, there seems to be no such thing as a lag between tropical warming and NH warming.

Francois, I believe you, but I’d be interested in a link.

Poleward transport of heat from the tropics is fundamental to pretty much everything we (think we) know about the climate. If the data doesn’t show this, then either the data is flawed (it is not a good measure of heat content) or we have to junk most of our theories about the climate.

I think the former and essentially agree with Pielke that measuring temps 5 feet above the ground is a poor way of determining if the Earth’s climate is warming or not.

Ice went out about 3 weeks late up here. This week we have clouds and showers forecast with our third excursion into the 80’s on Sat. Last June was hot and dry, but then our local climate changed back to late 40’s and early 50’s weather (or so I’m led to believe). We had freezes up north 2 or 3 times last week.
Minnesota the way we remember it: 9 months of winter, followed by 3 months of rough sledding.

Not quite 3 weeks Gary. I take it you live somewhere near the Cities. Anyway, here’s a link to ice-out dates this year across MN. Names in green link to historic data.

I think the answer lies in the fact India gets a monsoon but is dry for most of the year and China gets snow.

Anyway, the point is that soot and particulates can warm or cool at any given location depending on other factors. To ascribe a global effect is just wrong, unless you have first determined the local and regional effects. And I am quite sure no one has done this.

Global cooling is still climate change- that is the buzzphrase used by our environmentalists. So either way you cannot make an argument. It looks people look for perfection from nature, and hell I know that nature disappoints.

Carbon credits and footprints are going to rob our country of growth and more importantly take our effort away from reducing real pollutants like fertilizers, all the chemicals used in manufacturing, mercury from coal fired plants and CFL bulbs alike, NOX and methane.

The 1988 La Nina when temperatures dipped below -0.3 and were below -0.2 for a number of months – ie 0.1 to 0.2C cooler than now. Unfortunately, that event coincided with a peak in sunspot numbers and the solar constant so a direct comparison with the present underestimates the background global warming ie the real difference is probably closer to 0.3C (or even more).

Today Dr. James Hansen, Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, interrupted President Bush’s address to the Nation to report that global temperatures recorded in May continue to increase in accordance with the computer models used to demonstrate the impacts of man made global warming.

Dr. Hansen also alluded to the current administration’s attempts to suppress the news of man made global warming saying, “Other metrics reportedly “measuring” global temperatures have been influenced by these deniers.” He also re-iterated his determination to not allow these politicians to repress the truth about man made global warming.

In other news, the special Papal mass celebrating world peace day will be pre-empted by a special report detailing how President Bush has used his political influence to personally repress Dr. James Hansen of the GISS at NASA.

NBC has reported that their coverage of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will include daily updates on the impacts of man made global warming by the Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies Dr. James Hansen.

Today congress decided to forego the inconvenience and cost of a presidential election and use the Government Computation Method developed by NASA to forecast election returns. …”

We’ll see where we end up, but your original 0.1-0.2 is only 0.5-1 deg century. That’s about the long term trend since the 19th century, which indicates little acceleration and does not seem to be “catastrophic” to me. To get to 2 deg/century, you’d have to find a way to bump it up to 0.4, so I figure the 0.5 should give you a cushion.

John why would you define a trend in such a way? You have a full record back to 1979 and this shows a trend of +0.13C/decade (about 0.05C/decade slower than at the surface). That trend is double the average over the last century as a whole.

Your the one that was pickin’ La Nina’s. Weren’t you the one that wanted to focus on 1988? Why start in 1979? You mentioned the surface record, tell me what the trend is since 1950. How about since 1925? 1900? Pick a year, any year. Just make sure you don’t start at the end of the last cool phase of the PDO.

In light of the expected long interval until the onset of Cycle 24, the Prediction Panel has been unable to resolve a sufficient number of questions to reach a single, consensus prediction for the amplitude of the cycle.”

Please provide links, this came from http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/SC24/Statement_01.html and was release in March 2007. I was under the impression that they were going to issue an update in 2008, but that apparently hasn’t happened. Thing have changed so much over the last year that there isn’t much to be gained from year-old data.

The professor: “Doesn’t the fact that you are citing solar cycles suggest that AGW is not the catastrophe that some are positing?”

Eh, no. Solar cycles have a short-term impact on climate no matter how hot the planet is. Even if the planet would get so hot that the polar caps melted, global temperatures at solar minima would still be colder than at solar maxima.

The point is that when the temperature rises, skeptics come with all sorta of arguments of why it’s not relevant. One being: “It’s just the solar cycle”. But ever time it drops, then that is somehow a real change showing that global warming isn’t happening. That sort of argumentation is pseudo-science best contained in sunday-school.

“There seems to be little evidence that human beings are contributing much — if at all — to global temperature variations.”

First of all, if humans are contributing to it or not is really besides the point. It’s a problem no matter what. Secondly, the evidence is overwhelming, if you just dare look at it.

Tom: “But it also suggests rather strongly that “as CO2 rises, temperature rises” is false. Acording to algorean science, the continuing rise in CO2 should continue to raise Earth’s temperature accordingly. Since it has not it looks like Big Al is wrong again. So what else is new?”

But it HAS risen. Or are you taking a relative fall as proof that there is no absolute rise? With that logic, every winter is proof Al Gore is wrong, because temperature falls compared to the summer. Climate doesn’t quote work like that. :)

Walter Dnes: “And I can pull up solar cycle predictions to argue the other way.”

Please, go ahead. The rest of us can talk about something that is relevant for the topic.

Terry S: “The clear implication from what you say is that the current weakness in the solar cycle is enough to mask any effect of increasing CO2 and in order to do that its impact must be at least the same as CO2.”

No, what I’m saying is that the warming will hopefully not be as problematic during cycle 25 as it otherwise would have been.

“I’d be willing to bet that as little as 6 months ago you would have claimed that the solar cycle had no effect whatsoever on climate.”

How much do you want to bet?

“Its good to see that we are changing some minds.”

No, you are not. You are just clasping at pseudo-scientific straws in an attempt to to take the issue seriously.

Welcome to the world of heretics. I too was in the AGW camp. What got me thinking was the deliberate skewing of the geological record that became known as the “Hockey Stick”. From there I just stopped trusting anything on its face and read the papers. Its been tough as my training is all in earth and water – not air, but it has continues to reinforce my decision, even if many of my colleagues vociferously disagree (and many do).

In order to fit the definition of ‘global warming’…mustn’t global temperatures increase consistantly forever and ever from here to infinity?

As a so called ‘denier’, I don’t claim future cooling or warming. I could care less about prognostication…it seems rather pointless. This is why, as a meteorology graduate, I giggle at climate models.

Our ego’s help in rationalizing that which we exert no control (the earth, the universe), but they grant us hubris in conculsions.

And since it’s ‘all about the data’…what has happened so far is most important. Trends are nice, too. But since 1998…where is the ‘global warming’ trend?

Even with warming…it would be much more beneficial than enormous cooling. Why? Plants would thrive, growing seasons extended, ocean travel widened through the Arctic. Definitely not all bad! Yes, sea level rise wouldn’t be all that nice…polar bears would have to move south or face suicide. But this is all hypothetical!

Even some of my ex professors whom get massive funding for claiming future warming…for their climate ‘ego-driven’ models….cannot see into the foggy future.

We must let go of the need for absolute certainty and absolute ego fulfilment. We must learn to accept things for how they will naturally swing…it’s how the Earth works. And how it is affected by the Sun, and how things other than humans influence it.

May 2008 seems to continue a downward trend. Wouldn’t it be nice if it continued? Our brains are overactive with fantasy, aren’t they! Too disapprove of IPCC/NASA/NDCP predictions? To see if another Maunder minimum happens? To see ski season extended for 9 months out of the year in the Northern Rockies? To see world wide disaster and famine because of cold global temperatures as a backlash at human ‘hubris’?! Heh. May be not. May be so. Or may be the opposite? Time will tell…but even if I could…I wouldn’t want to look into a crystal ball showing the future.

“First of all, if humans are contributing to it or not is really besides the point. It’s a problem no matter what. Secondly, the evidence is overwhelming, if you just dare look at it.”

I disagree. A mild warming of the lower temperatures in the northern hemisphere of a degree or two ( which is where the warming comes from) will be beneficial to agriculture and even by IPCC numbers will not raise sea levels more than 50cm. Humanity is adapting daily and weakly to much larger variations. So a mild warming is not a problem.

The evidence is not overwhelming that the warming is due to anthropogenic CO2. All non computer model calculations give slight, half a degree or so for doubling, warming. The so called by you “overwhelming” evidence comes from the IPCC computer models that are falsified at the moment, except the update by keelyside et all that is fitting the current temperature trends and predicts a stasis until 2015 or so. I am sure if they fit the tropical tropospheric temperature trends the warming will become even more gradual.

All we need is 100 years grace to have lots of energy from fusion reactors . Fusion reactors pollute minimally with radiation, do not contribute to bomb making ,and have no CO2. This will provide the definitive experiment of how much anthropogenic CO2 affects climate because once fusion reactors get on the way anthropogenic CO2 will become teensy.

It is good we have a hiatus now so the planet can be saved by the irresponsible apprentice magician suggestions of the warmers, that will destroy economies and kill millions all for nothing, in my opinion, because I have convinced my self by studying the problem that the contributions of anthropogenic CO2 is minor. Millions are on the bring of starvation even now because of the hasty push towards turning corn from food to fuel.

I have looked at it, in considerably more detail than most. I have yet to see any persuasive evidence that CO2 is responsible for significant warming in the last 100 years. This is despite billions of dollars being spent trying to find such evidence.

I understand science and how repeatable data that can only be explained by a certain theory is persuasive evidence that the theory is correct.

I too believed AGW was real, just exaggerated for political and other purposes. Having looked the evidence, I now think now think any CO2 greenhouse effect (from the increases over the last 50 to 100 years) is so small that we can’t detect it. That is why there is no persuasive evidence.

When you confront the AGWers with the shakiness of their evidence, invariably they retreat to ‘but its the only way we can explain the warming that has occurred.’

Which is why the discussions come down to, is the warming real and can the warming be explained by other causes. Because if CO2 isn’t causing significant or even measurable warming, then either the warming isn’t real or it has some other cause (or causes).

>David,
>
>Your the one that was pickin’ La Nina’s. Weren’t you the one that wanted to >focus on 1988?….

John nothing like throwing up smoke to cover your tracks.

I’ve debated enough sceptics to know that to continue this discussion is a waste of time . Just remember the MSU trend is 0.13C/decade – that’s double the rate of the 20th century, and directly contradicts you world view.

relevant to the topic is that AGW “THEORY” requires a couple of specific things to happen. These are things the MODELS PREDICT. In other words, for their physics to be correct, and the models relevant, these things MUST happen.

One is that the upper troposphere in the tropics is supposed to warm faster than surface temp. It is barely warming, no where near surface rate.

Another part of the theory is that the ocean is supposed to be storing heat that will be the buffer to keep things warm during solar minima and other inconvenient periods. The Argo project data found no extra heat down to 2000 meters. In fact, it recorded a very minor COOLING!!

Until recently they claimed both Arctic and Antarctic would warm and start melting. While the Arctic has melted very nicely for various reasons the Antarctic has been very stable and has above average sea ice and Ice Pack!!

As has been mentioned previously, the only consistent warming has been in the Northern Hemisphere where most of the temperature record has been contaminated by over reliance on stations in UHI’s and questionable adjustments..

So, when scientists find that the data disagrees with the theory they typically adjust, change, or throw out the theory. When AGW types find data disagrees with the theory, they adjust, change, or throw out the data.

Let me put this another way. For AGW to be happening, CO2, and other so-called Greenhouse Gases must be causing EXTRA heat to be retained in the earth environment. That means that if all the heat radiates and can’t be found there is no DANGEROUS AGW. Since 2003, during the highest temps on modern record, the oceans did NOT warm. Now that the air is cooling off AND the oceans are not warming, where is the extra heat that proves the AGW theory?? There is some data from below 2000 meters and it does not show any extra heat either.

Here is a cool tool that lets you drill down through the ocean depths to see the temps. It is at annual, but, you can look through it month by month also with the arrow controls at the top:

“First of all, if humans are contributing to it or not is really besides the point. It’s a problem no matter what. Secondly, the evidence is overwhelming, if you just dare look at it.”—what??? go look at the 700Kyr ice core record. The very small temperature rise is a tiny tiny blip on the record.

Second, the beginning of 2008 is about “average” global temps. Look at the world food crisis, the failures to get crop planted and growing all across the US. Please give me back 1998.

Please tell me what have been the consequences of the very recent small warming?

Deadwood
Totally agree with you, the information we’re given via the media is predominantly sensationalist and frankly innacurate and misrepresented. I followed the links here and came to the conclusion that CO2 probably has a much smaller effect than suggested by official bodies and that the sun and the ocen currents a much greater effect. The most damaging effect of the global wrming hysteria has been the reckless and disastrous growth of biofuel. This has resulted in food riots as food prices soar and ultimately will lead to mass starvation if the current warm period ends, which is a strong possibility. The effects on biodiversity are also huge.
|I’m waiting for some official body to say that over-fishing is now contributing to the ‘pause’ in global warming as there are massive algal blooms occuring more frequently (more carbon in algae, less in the atmosphere)…just my SWAG!!

That sort of argumentation is pseudo-science best contained in sunday-school….much like man global warming catastrophic predictions based on computer models that can’t predict chaotic systems, but none the less are taken as gospel?

Face the fact, dropping temperatures are in direct contradiction to the IPCC’s calculations of radiative forcing. “Greenhouse” gases are supposed to have the strongest positive forcing of all, and the sun’s not even close according to their charts. CO2 has gone way up, since ~2000 temperatures have stabilized and in the last year have gone down.

True, but aren’t these the same guys who predicted that cycle 23 would end in Sept 2006 :-)?
”
and your response, “Terry S + Bill (about the cycle predictions): And your point is?”

My point is that you are making claims (below) about the relative strength and length of solar cycles based on predictions and estimates by NASA, who has been shown to be less than skillful in making said predictions. I don’t think you can make statements about the strength of the next solar cycle based on NASA. Fact is we don’t know enough about the sun’s dynamics to make skilfull predictions, just like we don’t know enough about the complex, chaotic system that is our climate to make skilfull predictions about its future state or the effect that one particular component will have on that state.

“Next cycle (24) will probably be strong, so in around 5-6 years we will see global temperature records broken again.

Good news is that cycle 25, that peaks 2022 will be weak, so global warming will be felt less then, presumably. And with some serious efforts we could lessen greenhouse production before cycle 26, which starts sometime around 2030.”

“No, but this is what NASA and other solar scientists claim. But maybe their science is “alarmist” too?”

Lenny appears to be confusing absolute temp from winter to spring or cycle to cycle with what is actually measured in the charts we all use. The charts look at deviation from whatever “zero” is picked and then averaged over time, comparing same month to same month, year by year, change from the initial average (which keeps changing). It isn’t comparing winter to spring. The latest drop in May compares just May to May to May, etc. Mays’ are getting colder. Aprils’ are getting colder.

Re: his argument that CO2 warming is masked by cycle cooling is a simplistic view of climate change that smacks of one rearranging his prejudices, not thinking or reasoning scientifically. However, It IS a classic debate technique and I give him 4 marks. As to whether or not his side’s theory proves correct, here is a tip just in case the other side of the debate is correct: Pendleton Woolen Mills blankets are TOASTY warm and well worth the price.

“There seems to be little evidence that human beings are contributing much — if at all — to global temperature variations.”

First of all, if humans are contributing to it or not is really besides the point. It’s a problem no matter what. Secondly, the evidence is overwhelming, if you just dare look at it.

Wrong on both counts, Len. It’s called Anthropogenic Global Warming for a reason, and to deny that is just silliness on your part. If humans aren’t contributing much, if at all to global warming (which is, in fact the case), then adaptation is all we need to be concerned with, not idiotically trying to reduce the completely beneficial gas C02.
Climate change is a fact here on earth, Len. Get used to it. It’s only a problem when we fail to adapt. And, believe me, global warming is benign, and in fact a benefit to mankind, particularly compared to cooling, which we appear to be headed for now, based on what the sun is doing (or not doing, rather).

I wish the major newspapers would cover this news. This is the first time I am hearing about this. Shouldn’t the UAH study have been in the front page everywhere? It is not being alarmist to report the facts..

“The point is that when the temperature rises, skeptics come with all sorta of arguments of why it’s not relevant. One being: “It’s just the solar cycle”. But ever time it drops, then that is somehow a real change showing that global warming isn’t happening.

Actually I think the skeptics point is that the warming and cooling is not PRIMARILY driven, if at all, by AGW / CO2. “When it warms it’s just the solar cycle” [not CO2 driven AGW]. “But everY time it drops [while CO2 levels are still rising therefore nature over AGW CO2].

Skeptic blogs might watch the temperature a little too closely when temps are falling [as does the Warmist media when it rises] but their message is consistent, nature over man made (or Mann made?).

2) “Hurricane / storm FREQUENCY is being increased due to global warming” to “Hurricane / storm SEVERITY is being increased due to global warming.”

3) “Ocean temperatures are the single most important measurement global temperatures”. “The ARGOS cooling since 2003 is interesting but doesnt impact the GCM’s.” “The SST bucket/inlet bias does impact the historical temperature records, but the land date is more important anyway.”

4) “GCM’s show us that temperatures will CONTINUE TO RISE throughout the 21st century” to “a 15 – 20 year leveling off or cooling is consistent with the GCM’s. “After all, we didnt say the temperture rise would be monotonic” though as an engineer I kind of thought that’s what runaway positive feedback is in the first place.

I think I see. You believe that the 11-year +/- solar cycles have a significant impact on global temperature, but that the long-term trend toward increased solar activity does not. Presumably you would say that the earth quickly reaches equilibrium temperature for any given level of solar activity, so that a series of relatively strong solar cycles has no cumulative impact, it just makes for increased variability around the underlying trend. Are those fair statements?

The point is that when the temperature rises, skeptics come with all sorta of arguments of why it’s not relevant. One being: “It’s just the solar cycle”. But ever time it drops, then that is somehow a real change showing that global warming isn’t happening. That sort of argumentation is pseudo-science best contained in sunday-school.

There is hyperbole on both sides, to be sure. But when absolutely every weather event/natural disaster (drought/flood, hot/cold, many intense TCs/few mild TCs, even earthquakes and volcanoes) are attributed to AGW, the theory becomes unfalsifiable, and is no longer a theory, but is instead wishful thinking.

Not to mention the faulty data being portrayed as gospel. There hasn’t been any net warming since the 1930s. And best evidence suggests it was warmer 1000 years ago and 2000 years ago. If you insist on focusing only on the last 30 years, then you’ve started your own sunday school.

John, an AGW climatologist, has his own blog & site much like RC, and he tackles all the skeptic arguments with aplomb.

I asked him about TSI, he told me point blank: The sun’s avg. output has decreased by about 0.33 W/m-2, easing Earth’s temperatures by -0.1 degrC over a 17 year period, and essentially masking greenhouse gases by the same amount.

Now, I’m a skeptic to the extent I think it has yet to be proven CO2’s warming effects are being buried in the seas & enhanced via water vapor, so I am OK with asserting that a dimming sun would mask GHG effects.

Barring there being a huge dangerous backlog of heat in the seas heretofore undiscovered OR some emergent factor that’d enhance water vapor feedbacks, please consider this:

If “natural variations” and a slightly lower TSI are all that’s required to mask the effects of man made GHG and those “masking” agents themselves have a minor effect, then the man-made GHG (I’ll just refer to MM-GHG as GHG from hereon for convention) effect is mild as well.

Or of both those factors are large, they could be temporarily masking a *large* GHG effect.

However, if we accept Dr. Svalgaard’s point that a large drop in TSI-effective is unlikely (and assuming TSI serves as a decent proxy for composite solar influence) then that’s one factor that can’t only contribute a minor masking effect.

That leaves us with “natural variations” (which Roger Pielke has described as a misnomer).

If natural variations are large & noisy, and only temporarily offset GHG effects then we have a problem.

Obviously GHG have helped bring the average up. But what if something else is going on, such as GHG not only adding extra amplitude on the peaks and bringing the average up, but also possibly even extra lows in the troughs as excess heat is offloaded more dramatically by a system that may want to tend toward thermal stability. The average might go up just a small bit, but the anomaly swings (up and down) would become more pronounced. A moodier system may not be a healthier one, but it’s not necessarily portentous of catastrophe.

And then there’s the other question of how long are we to accept that natural variations are still just variations and not long-term climate, as with the sun?

Just to interrupt the regularly-scheduled flames, we’re supposed to have snow in the mountains today in Colorado. I remember this happening in late sping when I was a kid in the 50’s, not so much recently.

If we’re really back where things were 44 years ago (4 11-year cycles) we should expect mountain snow as late as July out here: I remember snowball fights in La Veta Pass (37.5N 105W) about then, and ice staying on the north side of the house in Alamosa (37.5N 105.8W).

Does anyone else have a problem with the first 100 years of data (i.e., 1860 to 1940) in HadCRUT?

Does anyone know how bootstrapping can provide a “Global” “Average” temperature using thermometer data from less than 16% of the globe? (as is the case for the year 1860)

Is anyone else concerned with comparing a “Global” “Average” temperature which does NOT include data from Central Africa in year X to a “Global” “Average” which DOES include data from Central Africa in year X+1?

Is anyone else concerned that bootstrapping is only reliable when applied to Normally Distributed data — which Global temperatures clearely are not?

I’m not any sort of scientist, but just a lay person. The thing I keep coming back to is that as of now, its been warm for a few years and the media is hyping Global Warming. In the 70’s, it was cold for a few years and the media hyped Global Cooling and the coming of the Next Ice Age. In the 30’s it was warm for a few years and if you go back and look at the papers, they hyped a Global Warming crisis. And, if you go back all the way to the papers in the 1880’s, it was cold for a few years in a row, and they talked about the coming of a new Ice Age too!

In a few years, it will be cold for a few years in a row and the same people telling us about the Global Warming Crisis will be telling us we are all doomed to the coming of a new Ice Age.

As you can see, the difference between May of this year and other cool May’s is NH anomalies. May of this year had very low anomalies for Tropics and SH, but slightly warmer for NH (when compared to the cooler May’s). This is where aerosols fit in. 85% of all aerosols are in the NH. Lower sulfate emissions in NA/Europe and higher soot emissions in China are the reason why NH anomalies are consistently higher now – not CO2. Plot the SG anomalies for the past 30 years (satellite data). The trend is flat.

Also, why would you believe the temperature trends prior to satellite-derived data? That is the very definition of wishful thinking. Also, if you are going argue against a 10-yr trend by suggesting a 30-yr or 100-yr trend, why stop at that? How about a 1000 or 2000 yr trend? Reconcile this fact: 2008 ytd temperature is roughly the same as it was in 1940 (Hadcrut data). I will be more specific when the latest Hadcrut data is out.

Anna v: “A mild warming of the lower temperatures in the northern hemisphere of a degree or two ( which is where the warming comes from) will be beneficial to agriculture and even by IPCC numbers will not raise sea levels more than 50cm. Humanity is adapting daily and weakly to much larger variations. So a mild warming is not a problem.”

Well, “mild” could be defined as “not being problematic”, so yes. :) But I don’t think most climatologists are of the opinion that one or two degrees is “mild”. :)

“The evidence is not overwhelming that the warming is due to anthropogenic CO2.”

Possibly not, but so far we have in this thread yet to agree on if the arming even exists, and that’s what is discussed now. Lets keep on track for that topic for a while.

“All we need is 100 years grace to have lots of energy from fusion reactors”

Oh, yeah, that would be nice. But how much do temperature have to go up until you agree that we’re not gonna get that?

Philip_B: “I have yet to see any persuasive evidence that CO2 is responsible for significant warming in the last 100 years. ”

See above.

Kuhnkat: “These are things the MODELS PREDICT. In other words, for their physics to be correct, and the models relevant, these things MUST happen.”

No, for global warming to happen, the globe needs to get warmer, long term. Again, this discussion hasn’t gotten to any theories yet. The post claims that because the temperature has been dropping, there is no global warming. We haven’t gotten further than that in the discussion yet.

Bob B:
“go look at the 700Kyr ice core record. The very small temperature rise is a tiny tiny blip on the record.”

What kind of screwed logic is that? With that sort of reasoning the last ice age wan’t really an ice age, because compared to the temperatures during “snowball earth” 700 miljon years ago it was just “a blip”. It’s completely irrelevant if temperatures was higher hundreds of thousands years ago. This is NOW.

“Second, the beginning of 2008 is about “average” global temps”

Read my previous answers.

Pamela Gray:
You talki about some “Lenny”. As I can find no Lenny in the discussion, I suspect she meant me, but found my name to complicated. Please accept my excuses if you isn’t talking about me at all. However, if you DO talk about me, then you could stop doing that, and talk TO me instead.

“Lenny appears to be confusing absolute temp from winter to spring or cycle to cycle with what is actually measured in the charts we all use.”

I nether do not appear to do this. Try again.

“The charts look at deviation from whatever “zero” is picked and then averaged over time, comparing same month to same month, year by year, change from the initial average (which keeps changing).”

Since we are talking about 12 month averages, I.e YEARLY averages, it doesn’t matter if each deviation for each month is relative to the monthly average or any other point. It would end up being the same anyway, since it’s a 12 month average. And one of my main point here is that not even that can be used to say of it’s getting warmer or colder, since some of the cycles that affect climate, like the solar cycle, are several years long.

Bruce Cobb: “then adaptation is all we need to be concerned with, not idiotically trying to reduce the completely beneficial gas C02.”

No, you see, even if the temperature increase isn’t primarily caused by humans, that doesn’t suddenly make greenhouse gases non-greenhouse gases. And it doens’t make the temperature increase benign. And it doesn’t make adaptation any easier or any better. An increase in temperature i an increase in temperature, no matter what caused it.

Dan: “Ludicrous.”

If you say so. But calling it that will no make it go away.
For your other comments, see my answers to others above.

Morgan: “You believe that…”

No, I don’t. Don’t try to guess what I believe, you will be wrong. Read what I write, and answer/criticise that. Do not start criticising beliefs which I have not expressed.

There. Now you know. So, try answering again, and you probably will come with a much better answer. :)

Jeff: “If you insist on focusing only on the last 30 years, then you’ve started your own sunday school.”

Why? How come the warming that has happened the last 30 years doesn’t count in your opinion?

skepticsglobalwarming: “All this while carbon dioxide emissions continue to climb. So either carbon dioxide emissions have no relation to temperature or carbon dioxide lags temperature.”

OR, the temperature measurements are in fact correct, and temperature HAS risen.

“No I don’t (hold the beliefs you’ve attributed to me – that solar cycles have a significant short term impact but no cumulative impact)…”

Well, then I’m glad I asked for confirmation. I’ve observed that discussions frequently go off track because one or both parties mistakenly attribute beliefs to the other.

Here’s where my confusion came from. Previously you commented: “Solar cycles have a short-term impact on climate no matter how hot the planet is. Even if the planet would get so hot that the polar caps melted, global temperatures at solar minima would still be colder than at solar maxima.”

That seemed to imply that you believe solar cycles do have a short term impact.

Later, you commented that “the evidence is overwhelming” that warming is anthropogenic.

That would seem to rule out any significant cumulative impact of solar activity.

Lennart, I would say based on your responses you have a lot of reading to do. I would also say any further responses without adding clear data or direct applicable links to dispute posts by others will cause you to be labeled a troll.

Jeff: “If you insist on focusing only on the last 30 years, then you’ve started your own sunday school.”

Why? How come the warming that has happened the last 30 years doesn’t count in your opinion?

Ever heard the axiom “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.”?

By focusing only the last 30 years you’re ignoring all the prior precedents, and when viewing historical information we see that nothing happening now is unprecedented. We know sea levels were higher during the Roman Warm Period, ask some ancient historians. We know most glacial retreat occurred before 1950, ask some glaciologists. There were global warming scares in the 20s and 30s, hell, even in the late 1800s. We’ve learned nothing.

FYI, I didn’t say the last 30 years didn’t count. I said you can’t focus solely on that.

No, you see, even if the temperature increase isn’t primarily caused by humans, that doesn’t suddenly make greenhouse gases non-greenhouse gases. And it doens’t make the temperature increase benign. And it doesn’t make adaptation any easier or any better. An increase in temperature i an increase in temperature, no matter what caused it.
My my, Len, you do like to prattle on about nothing whatsoever, exposing your complete ignorance, in the true style of Bimbolopithicus Climatensis. The issue is with C02, whose warming effect is relatively small, and decreases further as C02 levels increase. Further, man’s contribution of C02 is only about 3%, making his warming contribution via the burning of fossil fuels negligible. There is, in fact, absolutely nothing man can do about climate change except to adapt, and if you think adapting to warming is hard, try adapting to cooling. It is idiotic to think that a cooling climate, which is almost a certainty at this point is preferable to a warming one.

>Just to interrupt the regularly-scheduled flames, we’re supposed to have snow in the mountains today in Colorado. I remember this happening in late sping when I was a kid in the 50’s, not so much recently.

In OZ our ski season starts this coming weekend. There is not a flake of snow anywhere with temperatures approaching 10C. We have just had the driest May on record and most of southern OZ hasn’t had a wet autumn for 19 years…. in part because of annular mode changes.

As you can see, the difference between May of this year and other cool May’s is NH anomalies. May of this year had very low anomalies for Tropics and SH, but slightly warmer for NH (when compared to the cooler May’s). This is where aerosols fit in. 85% of all aerosols are in the NH. Lower sulfate emissions in NA/Europe and higher soot emissions in China are the reason why NH anomalies are consistently higher now – not CO2.

Chris, I’m guessing you haven’t got any this published…

Would love you to explain why the surface in the tropics are warming fast as is the SH with the exception of the southern Ocean and the Antarctic (a hint is that the UAH product is problematic, and as recently shown in Nature it doesn’t match basic dynamical constraints – ie the laws of physics). The UAH product over the Antarctic is a pure extrapolation (so I wouldn’t get too excited about the SH cooling) – the radiosonde data suggests massive warming in recent decades for much of the year.

Just to remind everyone, the UAH product shows a warming of 0.13C/decade.
Lets revisit this in a year when nature reverts back to normal – ie the La Nina cooling ceases and the solar minimum has passed.

1. The La Nina has been fading rather rapidly the past 3 months. In fact, the waters of the tropical Pacific were mostly neutral in May. Yet, the tropical temperatures continue to drop. Also, you will see they did not get this cold in the last La Nina 1999-2000, which was stronger than this one.

2. I don’t think greater number of recording stations in the U.S. causes a recording bias. Look at previous months of global temps, and they often do not match up with the U.S. anomalies well. For example, March was a pretty cold month in the U.S., yet global anomalies shot up a bit.

In addition, this article is about satellite temperatures in the lower atmosphere, not surface stations anyway.

All of the temperature metrics show the recent cooling to some degree or another, not just UAH. And GISS is the only metric that shows warming in the past 10 years.

Also, if you are saying all of the recent cooling is due to ENSO, consider this…

2002-07 featured 3 El Ninos and no La Ninas. Also, if AGW is ongoing, how is this most recent Nina (not as strong as the previous one in 1999-2000) dropping global temps just as low (if not lower) as that one? Shouldn’t the effect be less, since ENSO just “masks” AGW?

Bob B: “go look at the 700Kyr ice core record. The very small temperature rise is a tiny tiny blip on the record.”

What kind of screwed logic is that? With that sort of reasoning the last ice age wan’t really an ice age, because compared to the temperatures during “snowball earth” 700 miljon years ago it was just “a blip”. It’s completely irrelevant if temperatures was higher hundreds of thousands years ago. This is NOW.

Lennart, you’re probably not aware but the “father of global warming,” James Hansen himself USES the paleo interglacial record to advance his claims of dangerous AGW. Hansen said he has stopped citing climate models in his warmings about AGW and relies almost exclusively on the paleo record to substantiate his claims.

The problems with this are many, not least of which is the fact that CO2 levels lag behind temperature increases, that the warmer interglacials became more humid as the biggest GHG, WATER VAPOR, was unleashed into the environment, that the oceans released CO2 from both desorption and the lower biogenic reuptake from warmer seas.

Every ice ages during the Eocene stopped before CO2 levels increased. The reason for this is the Earth’s orbit ( see Milankovitch Cycles )

CO2 levels always lagged behind the onset of interglacials. Even Real Climate concedes this: “…All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data.”

We are not being given a straight story by the environmental activists, they are bent upon galvanizing a herd of people into a huge gov’t controlled society that redistributes wealth. That’s not environmentalism, that’s socialism.

I don’t believe one should use the UAH 0.13C per decade trend line. It should be discarded.

The May 2008 anomaly 0f -0.18C is lower the December 1978 anomaly when the satellite measurements began.

In essence, the Excel-generated regression line producing a 0.13C trend is just an artefact. Data points that are shaped like a half circle will also produce a positive trend line when one should just say “the trend is a half circle. It went up, now it has come down.”

Of course, some of the recent decline is likely La Nina produced and, thus, a temporary variation in the general trend. But we are nearing 30 years of NO net change in temperatures at all which is not a trend at all in my mind.

Global cooling? We cannot make too many conclusions from one cold May. I don’t think this signifies a trend in our global climate, other than the one involving a greater set of abnormalities. C’mon, is anyone going to take this one fact as evidence we have nothing to worry about when it comes to driving Hummers et al?

Those aren’t my tracks. Yours are the only tracks in the sand. Remember, you picked 1988, not me. It actually makes some sense, since in a data set with lots of ups and downs, it is often useful to pick peak-to-peak or trough-to-trough the spot a trend. Picking the tail end of a cool period (1979) to compare with what might be the middle part of a cool period (now) may give a distorted trend. I’m not married to this, it’s just one of many ways of looking at the data. But again, don’t complain that I looked at the difference between now and 1988 and determined a trend. You brought it up.

“I’ve debated enough sceptics to know that to continue this discussion is a waste of time .”

Sorry to hear that. Sounds like your more comfortable discussing this issues with those who agree with you.

“Just remember the MSU trend is 0.13C/decade – that’s double the rate of the 20th century, and directly contradicts you world view.”

That is also about the trend from about 1925 to about 1945, the last warm phase of the PDO. Again, I’m not married to this way of analyzing the data, but it is one of many ways of looking at it. It’s not a “world view”, it’s what the data say.

Did you not read many of the comments here? We aren’t talking about one month of cooling…all of 2008 has been cool. And the trend for the past 10 years globally has been flat or slight cooling. Until that trend changes, the evidence indicates that global warming has stopped…for whatever reason.

We know sea levels were higher during the Roman Warm Period, ask some ancient historians. We know most glacial retreat occurred before 1950, ask some glaciologists.

I’m going to call you on both these statements.

Sea levels were substantially lower in Roman times. We know this from historical records. For example a Roman map shows a substantial island between England and France. We know this island was inundated by the sea around 1100.

While have we good records for some glaciers going back 70 to a 100 years, we have little to no data on many others. Even today we can not say with any certainty whether overall glacial mass is increasing or decreasing.

We have just had the driest May on record and most of southern OZ hasn’t had a wet autumn for 19 years

I must have missed a radical geographical realignment of the Australian continent, because south western Australia from Shark Bay to Esperance (an area as big as Victoria, NSW and Tasmania combined) has had the wettest start to the year in at least 20 years.

“We are not being given a straight story by the environmental activists, they are bent upon galvanizing a herd of people into a huge gov’t controlled society that redistributes wealth. That’s not environmentalism, that’s socialism.” leebert

The wealth distribution currently seems to be from the middle class to the very wealthy via fractional reserve banking, so some resentment of the rich is in order.

Until we have an honest banking system we are in danger of even more socialism.

Not only is it colder than last year at this time in Enterprise, Oregon, it’s 11 degrees colder than LAST MONTH! Solar flux continues its slow decent into REM sleep, in spite of yet another cycle 23 spot that just appeared. No number yet. Probably won’t last long.

The Sun has gone to bed
And so must I
I flit, I fleet, I fleetly flee I fly

WRT “masking” of AGW by natural events (Solar, ENSO / PDO):
If these cycles are strong enough to negate the effects of CO2 – even when we would have gotten warming with zero emissions after 2000, yet we have increased emissions since then – then we must consider the possibility that attribution studies may have seriously underestimated the contribution of natural variations, and adjust our estimates of CO2 forcing downwards. After all, if the negative (cool) phases of these cycles can pull several degrees C out of temperatures, is it not likely the positive (warm) phases add a similar amount?

Mrs Gray,
Right on!!!
Dum da da “dumb”.
There are a lot of them out there.
We just have to re-educate them. They are victim’s of our country’s failed education system, with the help of indiviuals like Al Gore.

Jeff said: We know sea levels were higher during the Roman Warm Period, ask some ancient historians. We know most glacial retreat occurred before 1950, ask some glaciologists.

Phillip_B said: I’m going to call you on both these statements.

Sea levels were substantially lower in Roman times. We know this from historical records. For example a Roman map shows a substantial island between England and France. We know this island was inundated by the sea around 1100.

And I heard references from many historians stating the opposite, buildings which were originally built near the shore are now hundreds of feet from the shore. I guess we both need to find some references.

While have we good records for some glaciers going back 70 to a 100 years, we have little to no data on many others. Even today we can not say with any certainty whether overall glacial mass is increasing or decreasing.

And the data we do have show that the majority of modern glacial retreat occurred before 1950. So how’s that calling me on it?

As a complete newbie (despite my username which I use in many forums) I have a question in relation to the GISS figures.
I have plotted two maps from the GISS/NASA website for April with a 250km radius with and without the Hadreyn Ocean figures and there is a significant difference in the apparent overall global anomaly. When GISS publish their global temperature anomaly does this take into account the Ocean figures or does it just use the GISS measurements. Also do they make any attempt to fill the large areas where they have no data (Africa, Greenland, Northern Canada for example)

REPLY: See these articles by my friend John Goetz, they should shed a lot of light on the issue:

Lennart in response to my post: ” But it HAS risen. Or are you taking a relative fall as proof that there is no absolute rise? ”
When I posted,“as CO2 rises, temperature rises” that is directly from the guru of gobbledygok himself, Algore. I didn’t say it, he did. And as every honest person admits, he flipped the graph from Co2 follows temp to temp follows Co2 in order to match his claims. I also qualified my next statement with ” Acording to algorean science” and yes, according to Big Al’s “theory” rise in CO2 should continue to raise Earth’s temperature accordingly. No ups and downs, only a claimed direct temperature response to CO2 increase. He said it, not me. And finally, you said,
“With that logic, every winter is proof Al Gore is wrong, because temperature falls compared to the summer. Climate doesn’t quite work like that. ”
Exactly, this point has been made often in response to the “tipping points” scare. Climate doesn’t quite work like that is exactly correct. Thank you for the verification, welcome to our side of the debate.

I’m a middle school teacher in the public school system. I teach mostly boys who have serious emotional or behavioral problems. Occasionally I have a girl referred to my class. Most are highly intelligent but socially unaware. Their scientific minds are astute. We discuss the entire realm of theories. The other science teachers do the same. Public school teachers have not caused global warming, 9/11, high gas prices, or your ingrown toenail. Nor did we put the sun to sleep. You get a referral to the timeout room and I’m calling your mother!

We already have ozone data and maps as well as water vapor data and maps. Plus temp data and maps.

Would it be possible to layer these maps on a day to day basis? Temp combined with water vapor/cloud stuff combined with ozone maps? The theory is that cosmic rays, which are hitting earth in an onslaught during minimums, destroy ozone, allowing ray particle penetration into lower atmospheric levels thus more effectively seeding through ionization which creates cloud cover and temp changes. I wonder how it affects the jet stream. From there pressure changes set up warm and cold fronts. That would be a cool map.

Could it be that solar forcing is far more active during minimums than at any other time? And planet reflective heating is active during maximums? Maybe we should be looking at two models.

Here in Everett, WA yesterday it never got above 50f according to my balcony thermometer, which might be getting a little heat from the apartment building, but 50f is still damn cold for June. The previous day the high was about 60f. And it’s still raining, for about 4 days now. More rain than the June, July, and probably August averages combined.

I thought y’all might be amused by a local annual average temperature model I developed for Wichita, KS. I like the Wichita data because it has no missing points in the time series, which starts in the late 19th century – pretty amazing.

I’m still searching for a rough mathematical definition of the construct “average global temperature.” Here I was positing that surface temperature follows a multifractal distribution, so that increasing the number of stations contributing data actually *increases* the variance of the measurement. I think the hypothesis is roughly worked out using station data from Canada for the month of April.

Philip_B Wrote: “For example a Roman map shows a substantial island between England and France. We know this island was inundated by the sea around 1100.”

I suppose you are referring to the fact that the Romans referred to the Scillies as “Insula Sylina” = “The Scilly Island” which may indeed suggest that there was a main island in the archipelago at that time. However southern England is in the forebulge zone of the last glaciation which is sinking for glacioeustatic reasons, so sea-level changes there have no climatic significance.
In the same way I can easily see that the sea-level on the Baltic Coast near my home in Sweden has sunk a few centimeters since I was a boy 40 years ago. This too is a legacy of the last glaciation – not a sign of climatic cooling.

I did exactly what you did. Notice that last rise above “0” in this minimum? And that it is staying above “0”? Wonder how high it will go and how long it will stay high. I am guessing this shape will be broad, not sharp. I noticed broad versus sharp shapes to the rise and fall of the graph. Given that these particles eat ozone and in their absence allow ozone to build up, I am also guessing that ozone depletion would not be uniform. Ozone maps of the globe demonstrate this. Maybe that’s why during minimums, cooling is not uniform.

My SWAG is that the owners of the GISS data will simply shift the baseline down to get a positive reading of around 0.6 for May. That’s how you keep the AGW dream alive, keep your job and stop the politicians from kicking your ass for leading them up the wrong path.

It is becoming more apparent that man made CO2 emissions have little affect on global temperatures, compared to the uncontrollable forces of nature. The late finish of SC23 and the delayed start of SC24 is becoming very interesting.

Does anyone else have a problem with the first 100 years of data (i.e., 1860 to 1940) in HadCRUT?

Does anyone know how bootstrapping can provide a “Global” “Average” temperature using thermometer data from less than 16% of the globe? (as is the case for the year 1860)

Is anyone else concerned with comparing a “Global” “Average” temperature which does NOT include data from Central Africa in year X to a “Global” “Average” which DOES include data from Central Africa in year X+1?

Is anyone else concerned that bootstrapping is only reliable when applied to Normally Distributed data — which Global temperatures clearly are not?

Yeah, very creative. Do you have any actual criticism to anything I says, or any questions of what I said? What is it you don’t understand?

Leebert: “dangerous AGW”
Tom in Florida: “Al Gore”

You guys are still trying to change the topic I see. Well, I’m not gonna. I don’t fall for that kind of cheap debating tricks. You are only fooling yourselves, but nobody else.

Pamela Gray: “Do you believe that warming is caused by CO2 and cooling is caused by the sun? Jez askin cuz I’m wonderin how you wood modul that.”

Answer: No.

—————-
A reminder: The blog post to which we are commenting is trying to claim that global warming is not happening, because global temperatures on the short-term scale has been sinking. I’m trying to explain that this is bogus reasoning.

Since everybody now seems to want to switch topics, my question is: Is there still somebody who does *not* understand why that kind of reasoning is incorrect?

Lennart Regebro: “The blog post to which we are commenting is trying to claim that global warming is not happening, because global temperatures on the short-term scale has been sinking. I’m trying to explain that this is bogus reasoning.”

The post never claims this. Read it again. You are the one going off topic.

Lennart Regebro: “Is there still somebody that want to claim that temperatures have not risen over the last 20-30 years?”

No. But the temperature rise is not significantly different than the warming earlier in the 20th century and it doesn’t appear to be accelerating.

This is interesting and well and good. It’s June 11th and the ski slopes are going to open in Colorado this weekend and it’s snowing in Montana and Wyoming. I’m not sure when Going-to-Sun Highway will open, but there is no plowing due to snow and rain. NOW let’s break down one thing. We need a corn crop and we may not get it. The mid-west is flooding and the report today said they didn’t have enough growing season left to plant corn, Burma has lost some rice production area and maybe a couple hundred thousand farmers, China is supposed to be planting but is recovering from an earthquake and lost farm acres. It sounds like the volcano in Chile is starting to quiet down, after over one month of eruptions. No real reports on how that is going to affect agriculture in the South America or temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere. We have a problem with UG 99 rust in the wheat in Africa and possibly the Middle East. We are running low in reserves of ALL grains – WORLDWIDE. Is it climate change, sunspots, CO2 (probably not), beetle killed forests, gas guzzlers or little green men? Al Gore told the Future Farmer’s of America to get out of farming because the third world could feed US (the United States) cheaper and better than we can ourselves, that is not going to work! There is something at work in the world and it seems to be ‘let someone else take care of me’. Whatever the cause, we need to take care of ourselves and be responsible with our resources. Watch your top knot and keep your powder dry.

Credible evidence of warming over more than a century would convince me of a warming trend.

Once such trend is established, nothing short of showing that the warming is unprecedented in scale and scope would convince me that such a trend is anything other than natural variation attributable to any of a multitude of causes.

“*OVER 20 YEARS WITH NO NET WARMING. I REPEAT, OVER 20 YEARS WITH NO NET WARMING*.”

“speaking of inconvenient truths, it is getting colder. ”

“I recently stated that there was no net global warming since ~1940, in spite of an almost 800% increase in humanmade CO2 emissions.”

“Looks to me like global temps have been pretty much flat over the last 30 years.”

“But by the next election period in 2010, global temps will have in reality plummeted another 0.5°C,”

“And yet the AGWarmiots will soldier on bravely, with a trembly voice, saying “the warming is currently on hiatus, having gone into hiding deep in the oceans”. The warming trend is still there, they will say (and are saying), just is being masked by a short-term natural (gasp!) variation. Then, they will point to any and all “extreme” weather, and say, “see, this is unprecedented, and is the result of the hidden man-made GW.” And, they’ll add, “when the warming does resume, it will do so with a vengeance so we need to stop all this C02 pollution now, before it’s too late.” AGW religion is resilient, if nothing else.”

“I realy don’t think there is any long term trend.”

That’s enough I think. And that’s just going through a small fraction of the comments here.

Loads of people here have claimed there is no warming.

REPLY: You make a point, and I should have been clearer in the timeline and what thread I was referring to, I was considering the current thread. Yes it has gotten warmer in the past 100 years. No dispute there. How much is attributable to CO2 and errors in surface temperature measurement is the question.

Feel free to dispute the recent temperature trends, particularly the last 10 years.

David:
“Credible evidence of warming over more than a century would convince me of a warming trend.”

Practical then that you dismiss all that older than 50 years.

“Once such trend is established, nothing short of showing that the warming is unprecedented in scale and scope would convince me that such a trend is anything other than natural variation attributable to any of a multitude of causes.”

The word “natural” is meaningless. If humans caused it, it is still natural, as we are a part of nature. The word “natural” here is used by you to convincce yourself that your arguments are meaningful. They aren’t. They warming is happening and it has the same effects no matter how “natural” it is. That it is “natural” does not make it good.

It looks like Going-to-the-Sun Highway might open this week. Latest since 1943, which was due to the war. Sounds like they have a lot of snow and it is not leaving very fast. Still have some snow on the higher mts around Helena.

All of you people are just silly. The chart itself shows an upward trend both for the high and lows. Yes, weather is variable. Yes, it gets colder and hotter at times.

Yes, the trend shown in the graph at the top shows it’s getting warmer.

Learn to read a graph before you use the data to show cooling.

Hawaii’s trade winds have inexplicably died down this year. Hilo HI has set record highs 5 times this summer. Global warming and climate change predicts that some areas will get warmer, others cooler, depending on how the winds and other conditions affect them.

Pierre, too bad inflation has more than doubled under bush and unemployment has as well. But I applaud you.

And guys, using one month to discuss climate isn’t what climate is. If I were you I’d read up a bit on the definition of the work CLIMATE vs. WEATHER.

I’d also look into factors surrounding lows in certain months, you’d be surprised to find out that 1992 correlates with the eruption of mount pinutubo, which spread a pretty large ash plume into the sky… remember all the beautiful sunsets?

As others have said above, the uncertainty associated with it shows that the down spike actually isn’t that statistically significant and is at worst at baselevel. Regardless if you plot a trend line through the center of it there is still an upward trend.